Program Director of Al-Shabaka, Engaged Scholar, Global Citizen

The Middle East Quartet: A Dishonest Broker in Denial of the Facts

Last week, The Middle East Quartet published a report urging the Palestinian and Israeli political leaderships to take measures to preserve the path for the two-state solution.

A critical reading of that report demonstrates why efforts to achieve a two-state solution have failed over the last two decades. The report is full of the inherent biases, problematic assumptions, ill-informed recommendations, and skewed views of reality that have been the hallmark of international institutions like the Quartet, which have entrenched the status quo of injustice, military occupation and violence.

Objective readers of the Quartet’s latest report can be easily confused: is it a report published by an international body or by an Israeli ministry or a Tel Aviv-based think tank? The main premise of that report is that it is “Palestinian terrorism and incitement to violence” that are to blame for Israeli insecurity and for the political deadlock.